Peter Taylor Talking to Terrorists: A Personal Journey from the IRA to Al Qaeda

In the course of a distinguished career spanning nearly 40 years, multi-award-winning BBC reporter and documentary-maker Peter Taylor has frequently come face-to-face with terrorists and their victims in his attempt to explain the actions of the individuals behind some of the worlds most notorious terror attacks. As a green young journalist he was sent to Northern Ireland to report on Bloody Sunday in 1972, and he devoted the next 30 years to investigating the Troubles, becoming one of the foremost experts on the subject. In the decade following 9/11, he switched his focus to the far more deadly threat posed by Al Qaeda, breaking news stories about intelligence-gathering in the period up to the 7/7 bombings and the plot to blow up a series of passenger planes mid-Atlantic. What motivates them? When interrogation become... Should governments do the unthinkable and talk to them? What are terrorists really like? How do the intelligence agencies elicit information from them?